Blog Archives

During 2018, we will be working on the construction of the Chrysalis Campus, most specifically the Chrysalis Secondary School, which will be a school that empowers more youth to be social entrepreneurs.

We’ll be enabling young people at the school, which will be in remote Northern Uganda, to learn what their own talents are, which will mean there will be opportunities for them to develop their creativity in arts, crafts, music drama, sports and even games and game design.

Here are some of the highlights:

We’ve received a 20 foot container distributed the contents and transported it to our remote rural centre in Koro in Northern Uganda

We’ve sponsored 83 children in school or university.

We’ve produced thousands of bricks using a donated brickmaking machine and started building our own school in Koro. We hope to complete Phase 1 of the building programme early next year.

We’ve trained a new group of Butterfly trainee social entrepreneurs and continued supporting disadvantaged children living in Acholi Quarter slum areas and remote rural Koro with activities.We’ve launched Gamechangers, a board game outreach project, designed to encourage new young people into board gaming and identifying new changemakers.

Boys and girls from the Chrysalis Athletics Club members have won every athletics event they have participated in this year!

Uganda needs more schools that put their pupils first and we believe we can have a major impact in Northern Uganda, based on our track record to date.

Grace Ayaa, the Director for Northern Development for Chrysalis, the organising running the Gamechangers programme in Uganda, is a great fan of board games and her children (9, 11 and 15) play frequently and have been helping with the teaching. Grace has discovered that board games can be very good at teasing out capability in children and building confidence.

“In Uganda, when growing up, children who are a bit different often underperform in schools and lose confidence. If they excel with board games, that confidence can be brought back. I find that, once discovered, the children want to learn more and more games and I can see their abilities and confidence growing week by week, which has to be a good thing.”

We want to give special thanks to The Creativity Hub, who are helping us in a number of ways this year to develop our board game activities. Creativity Hub produce the famous Rory’s Story Cubes, which have been so important in teaching children how to tell and write stories.

They are helping us expand the board game clubs and also to help train our young people in game design, so that in the future Uganda can have its own game design hub, where young people can learn games and then have some support to bring these to the international market.

–

We need to raise a lot of money during this year and are looking for partners to help us fundraise. To that end, we have set up a Justgiving page to allow people to fundraise for us.

Christine’s book outlines how so-called progress has combined with a host of other factors, including free trade, a market economy, population increase and the development of a super-rich minority owning most of the wealth of the planet, to bring about global warming and climate change which could lead to a loss of many species and mass human extinction before the end of this century. (Right: book signing at seminar)

Her target audience is aged 15-18 and any adult new to the subject. The writer was struck by the reaction of a teenage visitor from Mumbai (left) when given a copy recently. He looked delighted and not only gave thanks, but after leafing through the book repeated them far more emphatically.

When Charles in Uganda (below) was 15 he wrote about the drama project he founded, focussing on corruption: “You see a change maker doesn’t need to sit and keep quiet when there is an enemy ruining people that is why I never gave up with Drama project because I believe it create changes in this country and all over the world . . . It hurts me so much when I see some NGOs have stopped to offer their aid to this country because of the rampant growing of a big-headed corruption in this country Uganda and maybe in some other countries also. So you find that the people deep in the villages are the one to suffer – and they suffer a lot.”

Recently Charles – now 19 – who has obtained good exam results, ‘topping’ his schoolmates in economics, history and literature – made a video with the primary purpose of seeking help with fees to enable him to attend university. Like all the young people on the Butterfly Project, he is from one of the poorest of families in his area.

After introducing himself, he refers to the way in which Christine’s book inspired him and strengthened his desire to study economics at university, an education which would enable him to work to address the gap between rich and poor. He speaks of reading about the way economic activity can affect our environment and social lives and of the modern economics in her book – free of greed and selfishness (perhaps referring to New Economics – NEF?)

He ends by saying that he seeks education to fit him to create change in his community.

A UNA reviewer called Christine’s book a wake-up call: “A succession of well-researched and wide-ranging facts substantiate its warning. She addresses readers who are likely to remain sceptical of her predictions, piling fact upon fact, ending with the entreaty, “Look at the evidence”. However sceptical the reader may be, a close consideration of the evidence set out by Dr Parkinson must surely cause such a reader to reconsider his or her opinion”.

We have been reporting on the work of Ben Parkinson for some years on our former website now as part of Christine Parkinson’s newsarchived here (scroll down) and – since 2012 – with extra news in four articles ona Birmingham website. He has achieved such a remarkable body of work in Uganda – on a financial shoestring – that it seems right to add him to our list of networkers in his own right.

Ben started his career in marketing and is an accomplished jazz pianist who has played with the Midland and National Youth Jazz Orchestra and at Ronnie Scotts and the Hundred Club.

In 1998 he set up a music social enterprise known as Choice Music, which was developed to improve access to live music in the UK, which won an award for its innovation in 2000. In 2002, he became Chief Executive at Jericho Community Business, an intermediate labour market (ILM) organisation in Birmingham that still provides work placements to long-term unemployed. Ben brought in and operated New Deal, LSC, MATRIX, Co-Financing, and ESF while at Jericho, which also became one of recommended places to visit for the government Social Enterprise Visit Programme.

Ben has now been working in Africa since 2007, initially in Nigeria with Ashoka Fellow, Emmanuel Nehemiah and since 2009 in Uganda, where he has been responsible for developing the Butterfly Project, a project to train social entrepreneurs from the most disadvantaged children living in remote rural and slum areas.

He used the money from the sale of his house to found the project in 2009, intending it to be just a pilot for one year, but the results were remarkable, as the children being trained embraced the idea of being changemakers much more than expected. Since then he has recruited three other groups, from both rural and slum districts and has recorded similar positive results.

He is now most at home living in Uganda and spends most of the year working on the gradual evolution of the Butterfly Project.

In 2017, Ben hopes to set up a school to train teenage social entrepreneurs in Northern Uganda, implementing the core Ugandan curriculum with Saturday sessions concentrating on developing vision, implementing projects and otherwise utilising the existing Butterfly Project curriculum in conjunction with school programmes.

The original Pioneer members are now established young activists and lead Ashoka’s Youth Venture Programme in Uganda; many have won awards for their work or received publicity. Most have social projects that they are delivering, on which they can focus their passion for change.